Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2009-12-28
Flagged revisions petitions, image donations, brief news
Editors eager for Flagged Revisions
Predicting admin elections; studying flagged revision debates; classifying editor interactions; and collecting the Wikipedia literature
26 March 2012
Studying German flagged revisions, French library agreement, German court case
12 April 2010
Financial statements, discussions, milestones
8 March 2010
BLP deletions cause uproar
25 January 2010
Flagged revisions petitions, image donations, brief news
28 December 2009
Vibber resigns, Staff office hours, Flagged Revs, new research and more
28 September 2009
WikiTrust, Azerbaijan-Armenia edit wars
31 August 2009
An extended look at how we got to flagged protection and patrolled revisions
31 August 2009
Misleading media storm over flagged revisions
31 August 2009
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
24 August 2009
New board member, flagged revisions, Eurovision interviews
25 May 2009
End of Encarta, flagged revisions poll, new image donation, and more
30 March 2009
Commons, conferences, and more
9 March 2009
Flagged Revisions, historical image discovery, and more
16 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Wikipedia's future, WikiDashboard, and "wiki-snobs"
8 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Flagged Revisions, Internet Explorer add-on
31 January 2009
Jimbo requests that developers turn on Flagged Revisions
24 January 2009
News and notes: Flagged Revisions and permissions proposals, hoax, milestones
10 January 2009
Sighted revisions introduced on the German Wikipedia
12 May 2008
Page creation for unregistered users likely to be reenabled
29 October 2007
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
2 April 2007
The Seigenthaler incident: One year later
4 December 2006
Wikipedia in the news
2 October 2006
Single-user login, stable versioning planned soon
7 August 2006
A recent petition demanding the roll-out of the Flagged revisions extension on English Wikipedia has garnered 202 signatures (as of 30 December), citing concern over Wikipedia's biographies of living people. (Another petition, opposing Flagged revisions, has 14 signatures so far.)
Flagged revisions were expected to have been enabled much earlier, following several rounds of discussion and polling that culminated in broad support for the Flagged protection and patrolled revisions proposal in April 2009. However, that proposal required additional software development to implement all the required features. Wikimedia Foundation staff have also been concerned that flagged revisions would turn off some contributors, so additional effort is being put towards the workflow and interface. The current or near-current state of the extension as intended for English Wikipedia is currently active on the flagged protection development wiki.
In a thread earlier this month on the Wikitech-l mailing list, William Pietri suggested that planned meetings between Flagged revisions developers and the usability team would result in a clearer idea of what remains to be done, and the implementation on English Wikipedia will probably happen "soon-ish", with a more precise estimate to be announced soon on the Wikimedia Technical Blog.
Mary Rose trust
A donation of images from the Mary Rose Trust is scheduled for 3 January 2010.[citation needed] It is going to be accompanied by a DYK update of the Mary Rose and the Anthony Roll, and there has been a suggestion that it could be made into an extended Tudor England/naval theme for DYK at Wikipedia talk:Did you know#Scheduling a DYK date.
Briefly
- The appointed members of the Wikimedia Boards of Trustees, Jan-Bart de Vreede, Stu West, Matt Halprin and Jimmy Wales, have all been reappointed to one-year terms, through 2010, with a unanimous vote.
- German Wikipedia has surpassed one million articles. Wikipedians created a virtual quilt to commemorate the achievement.
- The Jury for Wikimania 2011 has been chosen [1]
- New Page Patrollers now have more options: Special:NewPages now has the option to view unpatrolled new pages which are 1 hour, 1 day, 5 days, 10 days, and 15 days old. Previously, they could view new articles from the front or back end of the log.
- This bot has recently been approved to help tag any WikiProject. It does 2 tasks: First it scans a stub category that is relevant to the project (for example, for the Album project: Category:Album stubs) and makes sure that each article is added to the project and assessed as a stub; then it scans the unassessed articles (again an example for WPALBUM: Category:Unassessed Album articles) and automatically assesses the article based on the highest rating given to the article by another project (if there isn't a rating, it skips that article). If any project wants it to run on their articles, they can leave a note on User:Coffee's talk page.
Reader comments
Criticism from climate change sceptic, decade in review
Climate change sceptic attacks Wikipedian
In the wake of Climategate, journalist Lawrence Solomon has an opinion column on "Wikipedia's climate doctor", alleging that User:William M. Connolley "turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement." The article accuses Connolley of a long-term campaign of biased editing in global-warming related articles, including abuse of his administrator status. Solomon, a global warming sceptic who has chronicled climate change denial and related viewpoints on the part of scientists in the 2008 book The Deniers, previously published a series of opinion columns criticising Wikipedia's climate change coverage and some of the editors involved in maintaining it.
Wikipedians have been discussing the column on the talk page of the Wikipedia article on Connolley, noting how misleading it is with respect to Connolley's history as an editor and administrator. Although Connolley lost his administrator status after a recent arbitration case, his editing and administrator activities related to climate change have on the whole been supported by other Wikipedians, despite unusually close scrutiny because of Connolley's focus on controversial topics.
Summing up the decade
Wikipedia has been appearing in many end-of-the-decade columns:
- A press release in Dawn, a Pakistani English language newspaper, mentioned Wikipedia in the list of 50 things that changed people’s lives in the previous decade: "the open-source encyclopedia, used the masses to police its entries and keep the information (mostly) (sometimes) accurate"
- An article on guardian.co.uk mentioned Wikipedia in its summary of the decade. The article, which discussed the transition to cloud computing, gave Wikipedia as an example of why the previous decade was "a period of liberation and creativity".
- PC World lists the "Top 15 Tech Events of the Decade", including #6 "The User Takes Control", with Wikipedia as a prime example.
- Livemint.com discusses Wikipedia as a prominent part of "A decade of digital explosion".
- Emirates Business 24-7 puts Wikipedia on "Our round up of the top tech trends that ruled the decade".
- TechCrunch's NSFW column by Paul Carr rants about Wikipedia and other technology topics.
...and many more.
Reader comments
Discussion Report and Miscellaneous Articulations
Policy Report
Several contributors shared their thoughts with the Signpost about our policy on Biographies of living persons. Per Rusty Cashman, the policy is effective and well-enforced, with the exception of the Privacy of names section; in fact, many infobox templates ask for exactly the information that seems to be prohibited in that section. He's concerned that this page or any policy page may be undermined if any section is widely ignored. Jacklee responds that that section is necessary to protect the non-notable relatives of notable, infamous people. Jack and Rusty are currently discussing possible tweaks to both the policy and the infoboxes. Seraphimblade believes the policy is central, but unfortunately leads to overzealous suppression of neutral and verifiable information. Coffee also rates BLP high in importance because of the real risk of defamation, a risk that's going to continue until every controversial sentence about living people is cited to a reliable source or removed from articles.
Everyone's invited to join the discussion of our Naming conventions for the next Policy Report.
Reader comments
Approved this week
Administrators
One editor was granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: RL0919 (nom).
Featured pages
Three articles were promoted to featured status this week: North Carolina class battleship (nom), Neville Chamberlain (nom) and Accurate News and Information Act (nom).
Two lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of houses and associated buildings by John Douglas (nom) and List of Texas Tech Red Raiders football seasons (nom).
One topic was promoted to featured status this week: Gwen Stefani albums (nom).
No portals were promoted to featured status this week.
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page as Today's featured article this week: Icelandic horse, Z. Marcas, French Texas, Christmas 1994 nor'easter, Rolls-Royce R, Prairie Avenue and William Barley.
Former featured pages
No articles were delisted this week.
No lists were delisted this week.
No topics were delisted this week.
One portal was delisted this week: Portal:James Bond (nom)
Featured media
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page as picture of the day this week: Long-legged fly, Bananaquits, poster for Three Friends, "A Brush for the Lead", poster for Hamlet, 1902 photocrom of Montreal and Pisaura mirabilis.
No featured sounds were promoted this week.
No featured pictures were demoted this week.
Seven pictures were promoted to featured status this week.
-
-
-
Wineglass Bay at Freycinet National Park -
-
-
Jigging in Queenscliff, Victoria -
the Sossusvlei
Reader comments
Flagged revisions petitions, image donations, brief news
Editors eager for Flagged Revisions
Predicting admin elections; studying flagged revision debates; classifying editor interactions; and collecting the Wikipedia literature
26 March 2012
Studying German flagged revisions, French library agreement, German court case
12 April 2010
Financial statements, discussions, milestones
8 March 2010
BLP deletions cause uproar
25 January 2010
Flagged revisions petitions, image donations, brief news
28 December 2009
Vibber resigns, Staff office hours, Flagged Revs, new research and more
28 September 2009
WikiTrust, Azerbaijan-Armenia edit wars
31 August 2009
An extended look at how we got to flagged protection and patrolled revisions
31 August 2009
Misleading media storm over flagged revisions
31 August 2009
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
24 August 2009
New board member, flagged revisions, Eurovision interviews
25 May 2009
End of Encarta, flagged revisions poll, new image donation, and more
30 March 2009
Commons, conferences, and more
9 March 2009
Flagged Revisions, historical image discovery, and more
16 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Wikipedia's future, WikiDashboard, and "wiki-snobs"
8 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Flagged Revisions, Internet Explorer add-on
31 January 2009
Jimbo requests that developers turn on Flagged Revisions
24 January 2009
News and notes: Flagged Revisions and permissions proposals, hoax, milestones
10 January 2009
Sighted revisions introduced on the German Wikipedia
12 May 2008
Page creation for unregistered users likely to be reenabled
29 October 2007
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
2 April 2007
The Seigenthaler incident: One year later
4 December 2006
Wikipedia in the news
2 October 2006
Single-user login, stable versioning planned soon
7 August 2006
A recent petition demanding the roll-out of the Flagged revisions extension on English Wikipedia has garnered 202 signatures (as of 30 December), citing concern over Wikipedia's biographies of living people. (Another petition, opposing Flagged revisions, has 14 signatures so far.)
Flagged revisions were expected to have been enabled much earlier, following several rounds of discussion and polling that culminated in broad support for the Flagged protection and patrolled revisions proposal in April 2009. However, that proposal required additional software development to implement all the required features. Wikimedia Foundation staff have also been concerned that flagged revisions would turn off some contributors, so additional effort is being put towards the workflow and interface. The current or near-current state of the extension as intended for English Wikipedia is currently active on the flagged protection development wiki.
In a thread earlier this month on the Wikitech-l mailing list, William Pietri suggested that planned meetings between Flagged revisions developers and the usability team would result in a clearer idea of what remains to be done, and the implementation on English Wikipedia will probably happen "soon-ish", with a more precise estimate to be announced soon on the Wikimedia Technical Blog.
Mary Rose trust
A donation of images from the Mary Rose Trust is scheduled for 3 January 2010.[citation needed] It is going to be accompanied by a DYK update of the Mary Rose and the Anthony Roll, and there has been a suggestion that it could be made into an extended Tudor England/naval theme for DYK at Wikipedia talk:Did you know#Scheduling a DYK date.
Briefly
- The appointed members of the Wikimedia Boards of Trustees, Jan-Bart de Vreede, Stu West, Matt Halprin and Jimmy Wales, have all been reappointed to one-year terms, through 2010, with a unanimous vote.
- German Wikipedia has surpassed one million articles. Wikipedians created a virtual quilt to commemorate the achievement.
- The Jury for Wikimania 2011 has been chosen [2]
- New Page Patrollers now have more options: Special:NewPages now has the option to view unpatrolled new pages which are 1 hour, 1 day, 5 days, 10 days, and 15 days old. Previously, they could view new articles from the front or back end of the log.
- This bot has recently been approved to help tag any WikiProject. It does 2 tasks: First it scans a stub category that is relevant to the project (for example, for the Album project: Category:Album stubs) and makes sure that each article is added to the project and assessed as a stub; then it scans the unassessed articles (again an example for WPALBUM: Category:Unassessed Album articles) and automatically assesses the article based on the highest rating given to the article by another project (if there isn't a rating, it skips that article). If any project wants it to run on their articles, they can leave a note on User:Coffee's talk page.
Reader comments
Criticism from climate change sceptic, decade in review
Climate change sceptic attacks Wikipedian
In the wake of Climategate, journalist Lawrence Solomon has an opinion column on "Wikipedia's climate doctor", alleging that User:William M. Connolley "turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement." The article accuses Connolley of a long-term campaign of biased editing in global-warming related articles, including abuse of his administrator status. Solomon, a global warming sceptic who has chronicled climate change denial and related viewpoints on the part of scientists in the 2008 book The Deniers, previously published a series of opinion columns criticising Wikipedia's climate change coverage and some of the editors involved in maintaining it.
Wikipedians have been discussing the column on the talk page of the Wikipedia article on Connolley, noting how misleading it is with respect to Connolley's history as an editor and administrator. Although Connolley lost his administrator status after a recent arbitration case, his editing and administrator activities related to climate change have on the whole been supported by other Wikipedians, despite unusually close scrutiny because of Connolley's focus on controversial topics.
Summing up the decade
Wikipedia has been appearing in many end-of-the-decade columns:
- A press release in Dawn, a Pakistani English language newspaper, mentioned Wikipedia in the list of 50 things that changed people’s lives in the previous decade: "the open-source encyclopedia, used the masses to police its entries and keep the information (mostly) (sometimes) accurate"
- An article on guardian.co.uk mentioned Wikipedia in its summary of the decade. The article, which discussed the transition to cloud computing, gave Wikipedia as an example of why the previous decade was "a period of liberation and creativity".
- PC World lists the "Top 15 Tech Events of the Decade", including #6 "The User Takes Control", with Wikipedia as a prime example.
- Livemint.com discusses Wikipedia as a prominent part of "A decade of digital explosion".
- Emirates Business 24-7 puts Wikipedia on "Our round up of the top tech trends that ruled the decade".
- TechCrunch's NSFW column by Paul Carr rants about Wikipedia and other technology topics.
...and many more.
Reader comments
Discussion Report and Miscellaneous Articulations
Policy Report
Several contributors shared their thoughts with the Signpost about our policy on Biographies of living persons. Per Rusty Cashman, the policy is effective and well-enforced, with the exception of the Privacy of names section; in fact, many infobox templates ask for exactly the information that seems to be prohibited in that section. He's concerned that this page or any policy page may be undermined if any section is widely ignored. Jacklee responds that that section is necessary to protect the non-notable relatives of notable, infamous people. Jack and Rusty are currently discussing possible tweaks to both the policy and the infoboxes. Seraphimblade believes the policy is central, but unfortunately leads to overzealous suppression of neutral and verifiable information. Coffee also rates BLP high in importance because of the real risk of defamation, a risk that's going to continue until every controversial sentence about living people is cited to a reliable source or removed from articles.
Everyone's invited to join the discussion of our Naming conventions for the next Policy Report.
Reader comments
Approved this week
Administrators
One editor was granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: RL0919 (nom).
Featured pages
Three articles were promoted to featured status this week: North Carolina class battleship (nom), Neville Chamberlain (nom) and Accurate News and Information Act (nom).
Two lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of houses and associated buildings by John Douglas (nom) and List of Texas Tech Red Raiders football seasons (nom).
One topic was promoted to featured status this week: Gwen Stefani albums (nom).
No portals were promoted to featured status this week.
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page as Today's featured article this week: Icelandic horse, Z. Marcas, French Texas, Christmas 1994 nor'easter, Rolls-Royce R, Prairie Avenue and William Barley.
Former featured pages
No articles were delisted this week.
No lists were delisted this week.
No topics were delisted this week.
One portal was delisted this week: Portal:James Bond (nom)
Featured media
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page as picture of the day this week: Long-legged fly, Bananaquits, poster for Three Friends, "A Brush for the Lead", poster for Hamlet, 1902 photocrom of Montreal and Pisaura mirabilis.
No featured sounds were promoted this week.
No featured pictures were demoted this week.
Seven pictures were promoted to featured status this week.
-
-
-
Wineglass Bay at Freycinet National Park
-
-
-
Jigging in Queenscliff, Victoria
-
the Sossusvlei
Reader comments